I’ve never made any attempts to hide the fact that I like recipes I can carry in my head. Things which don’t require much thought, but which are flexible enough for the optional ingredients to hand.

Things like my favourite fairy cakes or my trusty truffles.

But recently I’ve been expanding the list of easy-to-make treats.

There’s what I’m calling Rice Crispie Rocky Road: melt about 200g of chocolate with maybe 50g butter and 2 spoons of honey or syrup, and stir into a bowl of rice crispies and your preferred sweets or candied fruit. Leave to set and cut into squares. If you don’t have rice crispies in your cupboard, traditionally it’s made with bashed-up biscuits, or I expect other cereals could be used. Actually, this one works a bit like homemade Marvellous Creations. And it’s good and easy to make with little ones.

Or the sausage rolls I burned the other week: really, just pastry and either sausage meat or your favourite sausages. One of those ready-rolled puff pastry packs is enough for either six sausages or a 400g pack of sausage meat. Roll the sausages or sausage meat in pastry and bake for about 20 minutes at about 200C. Just don’t knock the temperature gauge to 250C. They’ll end up crispified.

Or a really easy ice cream: whip about a pint of double cream, then stir in a 397g tin of condensed milk and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Mix it well and stick it in the freezer. And it really is a no-churn ice cream. Depending on the flavourings, it can also be an almost soft-scoop. Otherwise, it’ll need softening for at least 15 minutes before serving.

The rocky road and the ice cream are both endlessly flexible and straightforward; to be honest, the measurements probably don’t need to be very exact, either. My favourite kind of recipe. This week, we’ve had the joy of an orange and ginger rocky road (with candied peel and glace ginger) followed by ginger and honey ice cream, which used up the rest of the glace ginger.

And there were some chocolate fairy cakes, with some random chocolate dinosaurs I found at the back of the cupboard. Because there’s no joy quite like a fairy cake with a cup of tea.